Gustavo Licon

Lecturer, Center for Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity
Phone: 607-274-1042
Office: Egbert Hall 344, Ithaca, NY 14850
Specialty: Chicana/o History, Chicana/o Movement, 20th Century U.S. History, Borderlands, Race and Ethnicity, Latina/o Studies

Dr. Gustavo Licón, a Southern California transplant, joined the faculty of the CSCRE in the fall of 2010. Dr. Licón offers several courses for The Center:  

  • CSCR 10700 Introduction to Latino/a Studies
  • CSCR 21100 American Gangster: Social Portrayals of Gangs
  • CSCR 23700 Policing the Borderlands: Power, Policy, and Justice
  • CSCR 37400 Latino/a Resistance Movements 

Dr. Licón serves as a coordinator of the CSCRE's Latino/Latina Studies Minor and the Native American Studies Minor. He also serves on the CSCRE Discussion Series Committee and Ithaca College's Steering Committee for the Dissertation Diversity Fellowship. Dr. Licón works closely with the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars Program, offering courses and mentorship to MLK scholars and at times traveling with them abroad and on their Civil Rights Tour. Dr. Licón has also provided workshops for students in both the HOME (Housing Offering a Multicultural Experience) Program and FYRE (First-Year Residential Experience), and offered Ithaca Seminars for first year students as they transition into college.

Dr. Licón is currently doing research and writing on the Chicano and Chicana Movement, specifically on how student activists' sense of identity, ideology, and activism has evolved from the late 1960s through the 1990s within MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán / the Chican@ Student Movement of Aztlán). In 2013-2014, Dr. Licón accepted a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This fellowship funded his research and writing for a year, which he did under the mentorship of Mary E. Odem, Associate Professor of History at Emory University. He has presented his work locally, regionally, and nationally, and is currently working on multiple journal articles and a book project. Dr. Licón has published and reviewed the following scholarship on the Chicano and Chicana Movement:

"The Ideological Struggle for Chicana/o Unity and Power: A Short History of California MEChA." In The Chicano Movement: Perspectives from the Twenty First Century, edited by Mario T. Garcia. New York: Routledge, 2014.

"Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino/as in Contemporary Politics, Law, and Social Movements, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Review of Making Aztlán: Ideology and Culture of the Chicana and Chicano Movement, 1966-1977. In, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Vol. 52 No. 2 (October 2014).

"Plan de Santa Barbara" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

"MEChA" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.